Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Furthermore, Congress added an adroit stipulation: the railroad would not receive all the land ten miles out from the track; it would get only every other section, with the nation holding on to the alternate sections, and thus sharing in whatever increased values might accrue. It was a happy solution, made more palatable by the rule that two sections in each township must be set aside for public education. In later years, when the Union Pacific gleaned a fortune on the sale of land the government had given it, jaundiced critics would cry, with some justification, “We gave our soul away to the railroad,” but in 1862 there had been no viable alternative, and in the long run, little harm was done.

  It worked this way. Back in 1785 when the surveys of Ohio and Indiana were being conducted, it was provided that an American township be composed of thirty-six square miles, each called a section. They were numbered in a way which ensured that two sections with contiguous numbers would also have contiguous boundaries:

  654321

  789101112

  181716151413

  192021222324

  302928272625

  313233343536

  The railroad received the odd-numbered sections, sixteen in each township, with the federal government retaining the even-numbered, except for 16 and 36, which the state could sell or lease to provide funds for area schools.

  Now, in 1873, the railroad was preparing to sell off a number of its odd-numbered sections, all the way from Omaha to Utah, and Henry Buckland, during his visits in New York and Chicago, had laid the groundwork for a massive purchase of these sections. He had till the end of August to decide whether his Bristol confreres wished to acquire sixty running miles of land on the south side of the railroad track, a stretch reaching from Line Camp Two to Cheyenne. Since the land was ten miles deep, six hundred square miles of range were involved. By purchasing only the odd-numbered sections, 192,000 acres in all, the Venneford people would acquire physical control of the even-numbered too, or nearly four hundred thousand secure acres. If the Bristol merchants could come up with the cash, the permanence of the cattle operation would be ensured for decades to come.

  So Buckland held a series of tough, inquisitive reviews with Seccombe and Skimmerhorn. “We have an empire within our grasp,” he said. “Let’s see if we can afford it.”

  The three men went over the maps and figures until they had the data memorized, and consistently . Skimmerhorn came back to one basic fact: “If we have our water safe on the Platte, and we do, and can get hold of this land up north, we control everything in between. We have to have it, no matter the cost.”

  Buckland was distressed by the fact that proffered land did not reach all the way east to Line Camp One. “We’d be unprotected on that end,” he complained, and Skimmerhorn introduced him to the facts.

  “We’re unprotected there right now. We’re unprotected over by the mountains. Within a short time, Mr. Buckland, homesteaders will begin claiming those lands. We have only a few years more of open range.”

  “It’s our land!” Buckland protested.

  “Only because we say so.”

  “We run our cattle on it. We look after it.”

  “But the time is coming, Mr. Buckland, when there won’t be open range. When I went back to Indiana for that last load of bulls, a man named Jacob Haish showed me something he’d invented. A fence.”

  “Cattle will go right through a fence,” Buckland said.

  “Not this fence,” Skimmerhorn said, and onto the table he tossed a piece of crude barbed wire, not the sophisticated product that would soon burst the market, but a primitive affair, with deadly spikes.

  “Farmers like Potato Brumbaugh will soon fence their lands with wire like this,” Skimmerhorn predicted. “And homesteaders on the Nebraska end will fence theirs ...”

  “And finally, we’ll have to fence Ours,” Buckland interrupted.

  “If we own any,” Seccombe said.

  “We must own it,” Buckland snapped. “As much as we can.”

  And then his two managers became aware of a fact that would dominate the rest of their business lives. Venneford Ranch was not run by Oliver Seccombe or by John Skimmerhorn. Lord Venneford had little say in it, nor did prosperous men like Henry Buckland. It was run by a faceless clerk called Finlay Perkin, and until he gave permission for the American ranch to buy the railroad lands, they could not be bought.

  “What’s he like?” Skimmerhorn asked, as Buckland prepared the message for Perkin.

  “He’s a Scotsman.”

  “That’s all we need,” Seccombe said. “A Scotsman running an English ranch.”

  “They have a saying in Scotland,” Buckland explained. “If you have three sons, and one is especially brilliant and of good character, keep him in Edinburgh, for there the competition is fierce and he’ll need all the fiber he has. If your second son is brilliant, but lacking in character, send him to America, where anything goes. And if your third son has tremendous character but no brains, send him to England, where the lack will never be noticed. Finlay Perkin is a third son. He came to Bristol.”

  The new transatlantic cable to England had become a fast link to home, and the three plotters took a good deal of time drafting their message so that it would seem enticing to a clerk in Bristol:

  PERKIN VENNEFORDS BRISTOL

  OPPORTUNITY PURCHASE UNIONPACIFIC TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND ACRES FREEHOLD GIVING EXCLUSIVE CONTROL EQUAL AMOUNT GOVERNMENT LAND ONE DOLLAR TWENTYFIVE AN ACRE STOP SECCOMBE SKIMMERHORN CONCUR STOP AUTHORIZE

  BUCKLAND

  Within a day Finlay Perkin answered. He said he had reason to believe that the railroad was not ready to sell now, but that an option could be had for ultimate sale at no more than sixty cents an acre.

  “We can’t offer them less than half!” Seccombe protested, but when he and Buckland went to Omaha with an ironclad proposal—option money delivered in New York within two days, total sum in escrow in an Omaha, bank—the railroad signed at fifty-five cents an acre and seemed glad to be rid of the land.

  On the way back to the ranch Seccombe asked, “How could Perkin, in Bristol, have known what American railroad men in Omaha were thinking?” and Buckland replied, “Perkin knows everything.”

  Charlotte Buckland had accompanied her father to the negotiations in Omaha, and now as the train rolled westward, with fascinating people crowding the parlor cars, she felt more than ever that she belonged to this vibrant land where a man could buy two hundred thousand acres of land in an afternoon, and she began studying Oliver Seccombe with increased interest.

  He was a handsome man, about the same age as her father but infinitely more vital. He obviously needed a wife. He was older than she and would not live forever, but there were other parts of the world she had not yet explored, and she was prepared to make some of those future journeys as a widow, if necessary.

  Young Pasquinel Mercy had wooed her with some ardor, and she liked him, but he seemed much the same as the bright young men who filled the British army; his tales of Wyoming were their stories of India, and both were boring. What excited her was not barracks life but the full swing of a new world: Cheyenne, Denver, Salt Lake. The names entranced her, and by the time her train reached the borders of Wyoming she had” convinced herself that ranch life in the west was what she wanted. Looking at her father, paunchy and dozing in the sun, satisfied her that the one thing she did not want was to return to Bristol.

  She therefore focused her attention on Oliver Seccombe, and before he was aware of what was happening, he was in love with her.

  They got off the train in Cheyenne, now a cleaned-up, booming young city with the whores out and the churches in. There, in the railroad hotel, they waited for the horses that would take them down to their inspection of Line Camp Four, and in the interval they explored Cheyenne, meeting numerous attractive Englishmen who had come to try their luck at ranching. One morning, with the air crisp and the sun radiant, she clasped Seccombe’s hand and cried ecstat
ically, “Oh, Oliver, I do wish I could stay here forever,” and she waited for him to say, “You can, you know.” But he remained silent. There followed delightful days visiting with English ranchers and listening to their euphoric accounts of how they would make their millions. “It’s fabulous,” a young fellow named Tredinnick cried. “Really, Charlotte, all you do is lead the cattle onto the land, and the bulls take care of the cows and the cows take care of the calves, and each year you ship the surplus off in a great goods train to Chicago and pocket the gold. It comes rolling in.”

  Have you sent any shipments east?” Buckland asked.

  “Not yet, but Harry over there has.”

  They talked with Harry, a young man from Leeds, and he had shipped cattle east. “At a simply staggering profit. This year, of course, what with the panic, prices won’t be so fantastic. But you can’t help making money, bundles of it.”

  These enterprising Englishmen had not forced their way into Wyoming and Colorado; they were here because Americans simply did not have surplus money to develop their own country. Foreign investment was essential if the west was to develop. So the British, with an excess of funds from trade with their great empire, were invited to do what Americans were incapable of doing, and Charlotte was constantly surprised at the imaginative way they applied their capital. She felt especially proud of Oliver Seccombe. But she supposed that he feared marrying a girl so much younger, and she began making clever and even bold observations to the effect that difference in age was not disqualifying. Once, as they inspected Freddy Tredinnick’s herd, she said quietly, “I notice the good ranchers build their stock from young cows and proven bulls.” As soon as she said this she blushed.

  “I’m not a proven bull,” Seccombe parried. “I’m just an old one.”

  She teased with him like this for several days, always thinking that he was holding back because of her age and never once detecting the real reason for his restraint. Erroneously she deduced that he was fearful of his sexual competency with a partner so young, and she concluded that this was a problem which only she could resolve for him, so on their last night in the railroad hotel, after the Negro servants had closed the doors and overfed Henry Buckland had plodded off to bed, she said goodnight to Seccombe, and they went to their separate rooms. She prepared for bed, waited till the halls were quiet, then slipped along to Seccombe’s door, opening it gently. She stood so that she was silhouetted against the light burning in the hall. Hearing Seccombe gasp, she went to his bed and whispered, “It’s not complicated, Oliver, not when you’re in love.”

  Next day, on the ride down to Line Camp Four, Seccombe could not refrain from congratulating himself on his good luck in snaring a girl like Charlotte Buckland—wit, wealth, family association with the Vennefords, and above all, an affection for the west. When she saw the camp, with its piñon trees and eroded pillars, she cried, “This is the Colorado I dreamed about,” and he said wryly, “We’re still in Wyoming.”

  This unkind remark sprang from the deep apprehension he felt toward any permanent involvement with this attractive girl. She was wrong in assuming that he held back because of anxiety over their difference in ages. He knew that she thought he was forty-eight, three years younger than her father, when he was really fifty-five. But he also knew that his vitality was not impaired. When she contrived opportunities to be alone with him among the piñon trees or in the secrecy of the barn, and she managed several, their enjoyment of each other was complete.

  Nor was his affection for her passive. He loved the sound of her voice, her British manner of singing words and giving a lilt to her sentences, so refreshing after the years of flat American accents. When she said, as they were halting for a picnic, “The curve of that hill reminds me of the strangest thing, the lovely terraces of Bristol,” he would see again the noble sweep of Georgian stone houses he had known as a boy.

  She reminded him of his Englishness, and whereas he had been content in America, growing to respect its extraordinary diversity from Santa Fe to Oregon, he did remain English at heart, and it was good, in these later years of his life, to have that heritage refreshed.

  “You’re slow in proposing, Oliver,” she said one afternoon as they returned from the barn. “I should like to live here, to know that each summer we could come out to this camp.”

  “I’m too old,” he said, although he had just finished proving that he was not.

  He was restrained not by age but by a sensible conviction that if he got too entangled with the Bucklands, he would face disaster. He was far more worried about Henry Buckland than he was about Charlotte, because the canny merchant had begun to ask those penetrating questions which the curators of the Venneford Ranch could not answer.

  For some years Seccombe, in an effort to keep his Bristol investors happy, had been declaring cash dividends when none had been earned. In 1872, for example, he had paid a tidy eight percent by the simple device of buying 6626 mature longhorns from L. D. Kane in Wyoming and turning around and selling 2493 of them to packing houses in Chicago for beef. He entered the sale on his books as a profit, as if it had been 2493 calves raised on the ranch that he had sold. There had also been unusual expenses connected to the acquisition of land, items he did not want to appear on the books, like the train fare for the spurious homesteaders from Elmwood, Illinois. Oliver Seccombe had not misappropriated any Venneford money for his own use, but he had diverted much of it into channels that he could not now explain satisfactorily.

  Buckland, becoming increasingly suspicious of Seccombe, started to make cautious inquiries among the ranch hands. One day at Line Camp Four he showed Skimmerhorn a report which had been assembled by Finlay Perkin. The Scotsman had lifted from the Venneford records an account of every animal the investors had paid for. It was an impressive list:

  To Henry Buckland:

  When you reach the ranch you should find these cattle on the premises:

  1868delivery by R. J. Poteet, Texas2934

  purchase from L. D. Kane, Wyoming4817

  1869delivery by J. J. Stoat, Texas2404

  purchase from John Skene, Colorado4419

  1870 delivery by R. J. Poteet, Texas, two lots4559

  purchase from L. Y. Frame, Wyoming6697

  1871 delivery by R. J. Poteet, Texas, two lots4816

  purchase from K. N. Kennedy, Illinois86

  1872 delivery by R. J. Poteet, Texas, two lots4831

  purchase from L. D. Kane, Wyoming6626

  purchase from K. N. Kennedy, Illinois93

  --------

  Total stock acquired42,282

  It would be desirable for you to check on the presence or absence of every animal listed, especially the expensive Shorthorns acquired from Illinois.

  Finlay Perkin

  When Skimmerhorn saw Perkin’s suggestion, he could not suppress a smile. “Sir,” he said disarmingly to Buckland, “God himself doesn’t know where all those cattle are.”

  And for the first time a Bristol member of Venneford Ranch Limited realized that running a herd of Texas longhorns on a ranch containing more than five million acres was not the same as importing bolts of silk from India, or investing in consols, where a paper certificate proved that you had actual possession of the consols. Running cattle on a great western ranch was a little more imprecise.

  With this discovery, Buckland’s questioning became more detailed, and now John Skimmerhorn faced his second moral problem as manager of the ranch. The first one had come when he had helped Potato Brumbaugh fight off the gunmen. This one centered, as it would on every western ranch owned by absentee Englishmen, on the phrase book count.

  Mr. Buckland pointed to the two purchases made from L. D. Kane, of Wyoming. “They total eleven thousand head of cattle. A good many dollars are involved. Now, I feel sure you counted them as you got them.”

  Skimmerhorn smiled nervously. “You see, sir, that’s what we call book count.”

  “If you count, you count.”
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br />   “But when you buy in that number ... After all, Kane didn’t have his cattle penned up.”

  “Where were they?”

  “Book count means that there ought to be that number of cattle and that they ought to be somewhere.”

  “Good God!”

  “You’re dealing with honorable men. If Kane says he has ...”

  “I wouldn’t accept that kind of statement from the most prestigious merchant in India. If he says he’s sending me three hundred bolts ...”

  “Cattle are not bolts of silk,” Seccombe interrupted.

  “I’m beginning to think they’re invisible.”

  What Skimmerhorn did not tell Buckland, hence the moral question, was that he and Jim Lloyd had always had grave suspicions about the various book counts passed along to the Venneford Ranch. Finlay Perkin’s figures showed that the ranch had paid for more than forty-two thousand head of cattle; Skimmerhorn doubted that more than twenty-five thousand were on hand now. And there was also the matter of how Seccombe paid dividends.